popped by a pin, the rest of her went all at once, bursting at the sudden release of pressure. All Trini and Roberto saw was her head, which in one moment was a disfigured, although recognizable, human head, and the next moment was a wash of green gunk that completely covered the inside of her faceplate.
Hero fell, dead.
But she’d kept her suit intact.
LESS THAN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS LATER, TRINI AND ROBERTO WERE IN the car, just over three miles away from the Atchison mines, their eyes glued to the box in the back of the truck just ahead of them. Hero’s field case had been packed, unopened, into a larger sealed crate filled with dry ice.
So far things had gone smoothly. Gordon Gray, the head of the DTRA, had taken Trini and Roberto exactly at their word, because they were the best, and he ordered their explicit instructions be followed to the letter. When Gordon Gray gave an order, people followed it, and since all the residents of the town were dead and the land itself held no value, there was no one and no reason to object. The firebombing of Kiwirrkurra was agreed to without debate by the respective governments. The unlucky place burned, and with it every molecule of Cordyceps novus, except for the sample in Hero’s biotube.
The question of what to do with the tube was tougher to answer. As Hero had speculated, the CDC wanted no part of storing something that had been born, or at any rate partially bred, in outer space. Though the Defense Department was willing, its only suitable facility was Fort Detrick, which was out of the question. The breach there eighteen months earlier had triggered a top-down review that was only now entering its second stage, and the idea of cutting short a safety analysis in order to store an unknown growth of unprecedented lethality was not met with enthusiasm.
Atchison was Trini’s idea. She’d worked with the National Nuclear Safety Administration in the early ’80s on weapons dismantlement and disposition readiness, as the idea of nuclear disarmament became politically palatable under the Reagan administration’s INF Treaty initiative. Sub-level 4 of the Atchison mine facility had been conceived and dug out as an alternative to the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex, disposal centers that were at capacity already, dealing with outmoded fission devices from the late ’40s and early ’50s. But as INF negotiations dragged on it became clear that Reagan’s strategy was really to get the other guy to disarm, and Atchison’s lowest sub-level sat empty and secure, never to be used.
The location was ideal for their needs. Because the mines were uniquely situated over a second-magnitude underground cold spring that pushed near-freezing water up from the bedrock at 2,800 liters per second, the lowest subterranean level at Atchison never rose above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in the unlikely event of an extended power outage, the temperature at which the fungus would be stored was guaranteed to remain stable, keeping it in a perpetual low-or no-growth environment, even if it somehow broke free of its containment tube. It was a perfect plan. Cordyceps novus was thus given a home, sealed inside a biotube three hundred feet underground in a sub-basement that didn’t officially exist.
AS TIME WENT BY, FEWER AND FEWER PEOPLE AT DTRA CAME TO SHARE Trini and Roberto’s alarmist view of the destructive capabilities of Cordyceps novus. How could they? They hadn’t seen it. There were no photographic records. The remote town had been incinerated, and the only remaining sample of the fungus was locked away, out of sight and out of mind. People forgot. People moved on.
Sixteen years later, in 2003, the DTRA decided the mine complex was a Cold War relic that could be dispensed with. The place was cleared out, cleaned up, given a coat of paint, and sold to Smart Warehousing for private use. The self-storage giant threw up some drywall, bought 650 locking overhead garage doors from Hörmann, and opened it up to the public. Fifteen thousand boxes of useless crap were thus given a clean, dry, and permanent underground home. That thirty-year-old drum kit that you never played could now survive a nuclear war.
The storage plan for Cordyceps novus was a perfect one.
Unless, that is, Gordon Gray took early retirement.
And his successor decided sub-level 4 was better off sealed up and forgotten.
And the temperature of the planet rose.
But how likely was any of that?
Your Honor, I get it. I mean, you are looking at a man who gets it.”
Teacake hadn’t prepared anything, but for him words came whether he wanted them to or not, so even though he knew he wasn’t the best person to speak in his own defense at his sentencing hearing, he figured he was the most qualified to wing it.
“Okay, so the last time we met, here in Your Honor’s courtroom, a few years ago, you made a great suggestion. ‘Hey,’ you said, ‘what if instead of me sending you to Ellsworth, you join the military instead?’ That was a great idea, thank you for that, and I totally took Your Honor up on that one. Two years in the navy, submarine corps, and let me tell you, that pressure testing is no picnic. Great experience for me, though. Honorable discharge.”
The judge looked down at the sentencing report on the bench in front of him. “Says here ‘General Discharge, Honorable Conditions.’”
“Right, yeah. Exactly. So, similar thing there.”
The public defender assigned to Teacake gave him a look that said, You are not helping.
But Teacake pressed on. “Point is, I got it then, and I get it now. Victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I mean, I know that’s not gonna cut it with you, but there are, like, super-mitigating circumstances here. I get talked into stuff, that’s my problem, but my personal feeling is I should never have to do time for this. Not for basically sitting in a car, basically. I mean, it’s no way to treat a veteran, for starters. But you probably took one look at me and were like, ‘You again,’ and I get that, I do.”
“Are you finished?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna wrap up. Long story short, if you have a buddy who goes by Hazy Davy and he ever asks you to stay with the car while he runs in to do this one quick thing super quick and you already know your name is sorta mud in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, you should for sure remember a previous commitment. That’s all I’m saying.”
He started to sit down, then stood up again.
“Sorry, one more thing, real quick. I also been sick with the modern disease known as white privilege, for which I am very sorry. Although, that one’s kinda not on me, I gotta say, I can’t help I’m white. Anyway, uh, thank you.”
Teacake sat down abruptly and didn’t dare glance at his lawyer. He could read a room. The judge put on his glasses, picked up the sentencing report, and said six words.
“Thank you, Mr. Meacham. Nineteen months.”
By the time he got out of prison, Teacake’s post–high school résumé had exactly two things on it: a mediocre service record and his stint in Ellsworth Correctional. So the job at Atchison Storage was the best thing that could have possibly happened to him, even at $8.35 an hour. Corporate didn’t like a lot of employees to chase around and look after, so everybody did twelve-hour shifts, six to six, four days a week. Teacake was the new man and got nights, Thursday through Sunday. Truth is, he didn’t much like the few friends he still had around here, and he wasn’t looking to make any new ones unless maybe one of them was Her, so saying he’d take the social graveyard shift was no big deal. It might have been the reason he got the job. That, and the fact that he had all his teeth, which meant he was reasonably clean. Around here a full toothy smile was the only character reference you needed to sit at a reception desk and look after 650 locked underground storage units in the middle of the night. It was not, as they say, the science of rocketry.
Teacake always tried to get to work